A ruble-backed stablecoin built by a sanctioned Russian defence bank has handled nearly $140bn of turnover since it was created 18 months ago.

Pyotr Fradkov, chairman and chief executive of PSB Bank and son of a former prime minister, said A7A5 had reached that figure since February 2025. “This is a small piece of the global stablecoin market, but it is the largest non-dollar stablecoin,” he told the RBC news agency. A7A5 was built as a component of the A7 settlement infrastructure, PSB's cross-border payments platform, Reuters reported on August 10.

The platform has 15,000 regular customers of varying sizes and processes up to 2,000 payments a day, Fradkov said. A7 has previously said 90% of its flows are with Asian countries, China predominating.

Which is the point of the whole exercise. PSB is Russia's defence-sector bank, cut off from Western correspondent banking, and A7 exists to move money for companies that cannot use the dollar system. A stablecoin is simply the cheapest available plumbing for that - a token that holds a ruble value and settles on a chain nobody has to ask permission to use.

Turnover is not the same as value held, and $140bn cumulative turnover across 18 months on 2,000 payments a day is a claim from an interested party with no independent audit behind it. What it does establish is the direction: Russian banks are building payment rails outside the dollar system and have got far enough to start talking about the numbers. Alfa Bank launched its own crypto cross-border payment service in July.

The rails are already carrying trade

The coin did not begin as a bank product. A7A5 launched in February 2025, issued out of Kyrgyzstan by a local firm, Old Vector, and built by A7, the platform founded by the fugitive Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor to move money past sanctions. A spike in payments through it in July 2025 set off the first evasion alarms. That August the US sanctioned Grinex, the Kyrgyz exchange that trades only A7A5 and rubles, and the UK hit a Kyrgyz bank and further exchanges days later. By May this year the token sat at the centre of a full-scale sanctions-evasion scheme.

Two things have changed since. The coin acquired a legal identity at home, granted the status of a foreign digital right in late 2025, which made it a recognised financial instrument in Russia. And the mainstream banks arrived: Alfa Bank's July launch undercut A7 on price, at 0.16% rising to 0.3% from September 1 against A7's 0.3% floor. A7A5 is now the second most actively transferred token on the TRON blockchain anywhere in the world, on BitOK's count cited by Kommersant.

Moscow is building the legal frame around it

The state has spent this year putting statute underneath all of this. The law on Digital Currency and Digital Rights, submitted in the spring, cleared its second and third readings in the State Duma in late July after amendments held it up, and the main body of it takes effect on September 1, with a transition period to July 1 2027 for firms to license and register.

After its initial reluctance to endorse cryptocurrency, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has been badgered into building a legal framework for a digital ruble as the US sanctions on Russia’s use of the dollar have proven to be insurmountable. Domestic crypto payments stay banned - nobody is buying groceries with this - but settlements under foreign trade contracts between residents and non-residents are carved out as an explicit exception. Every transaction must run through intermediaries licensed by the Central Bank, with digital depositories, also CBR-supervised, holding the assets. Non-qualified investors are capped at RUB300,000 ($3,800) a year and transfers to non-custodial wallets at RUB100,000 ($1,296). The retail door is being bolted and the trade door widened.

One caveat on the coin itself: the new law does not cover stablecoins. A separate framework for fiat-backed digital assets aimed specifically at international settlement is still being drafted, which is why A7A5 needed its bespoke foreign-digital-right classification in the first place. The rails are being legalised faster than the token riding them. Russia has even experimented with a gold-backed cryptocurrency and Russia has already become Europe’s largest cryptocurrency market – largely as a result of the extreme sanctions regime imposed in 2022.

Nobody can tell from an unaudited turnover claim whether any of this displaces the dollar in BRICS trade. Russia and Belarus made their first cross-border digital financial asset transactions in January 2025, Trump threatened BRICS members with 150% tariffs a month later if they moved to drop the dollar. Russian President Vladimir Putin showcased the BRICS Pay crypto coin at the BRICS Kazan summit last year and all the BRICS members are actively developing electronic versions of their national currencies as a potential payment tender for their mutual trade. A7 says 90% of its flows already run to Asia, China predominating. The dollar's competition here is not a BRICS currency, which remains a talking point, but private tokens on bank rails, assembled one jurisdiction at a time.